jeudi 14 février 2013

Our second February ECC meeting will take place on Monday, February 25, from 4 to 6 p.m.
in the Chemistry Department at NYU, room 1003 (31 Washington Place,
between Washington Square Park and Greene Street). You will need a
photo ID to enter the building.

Our speaker will be Rachel Dutton,
a Bauer Fellow at Harvard University's FAS Center for Systems Biology,
whose lab studies the microbial communities found on cheese. In caves
and cellars around the world, communities of microbes colonize the
surface of cheese as it ages. While these communities contribute to the
aromas, flavors, and textures of aged cheeses, they can also be thought
of as ideal model ecosystems to study microbes in their natural
environment. With the advent of cheaper and more efficient DNA
sequencing technologies, microbial communities can be examined in
unprecedented detail. However, these techniques have rarely been applied
to microbial ecosystems of fermented foods, and as a result, the exact
nature of many of these communities remains a mystery. Dr. Dutton
will discuss research in her lab using these DNA sequencing
technologies to study community patterns in a collection of over 100
different types of cheese. She will discuss some of the highlights of
this study, and the implications for future work and understanding of
cheese. She will also discuss how her lab is using in vitro cheese to test models of community formation and interactions between microbes in the lab.

Please RSVP at ecc022013b.eventbrite.com. A link is also posted on our website. If you RSVP and can no longer make it, please let me know right away so that your seat can be released---thank you!

All my best,

Anne

----Anne E. McBrideDirector, Experimental Cuisine Collective

ABOUT THE EXPERIMENTAL CUISINE COLLECTIVEThe
Experimental Cuisine Collective is a working group that assembles
scholars, scientists, chefs, writers, journalists, performance artists,
and food enthusiasts. We launched in April 2007, as a result of the
collaboration of Kent Kirshenbaum of the chemistry department and Amy
Bentley of the nutrition, food studies, and public health department at
New York University with Chef Will Goldfarb of WillPowder. Our overall
aim is to develop a broad-based and rigorous academic approach that
employs techniques and approaches from both the humanities and sciences
to examine the properties, boundaries, and conventions of food.